Parental involvement conference forgets to invite parents

Man, it sure could've gotten crowded around the Sheraton Astrodome this weekend. That's where the second annual statewide conference on "Parental Involvement: Making a Difference in Texas Public Schools" is taking place.

Can you imagine the traffic jam that would be taking place at the corner of Loop 610 and Kirby if even a quarter of the Houston area's hundreds of thousands of parents were to show up at this conference?

I dunno, maybe that's why the conference's sponsors, headed by the Texas Education Agency, didn't bother to invite parents to a conference about parents.

Doink!

In the event you're a parent scratching her head — no, they didn't bother to tell us about the FIRST conference, either.

"The goal of the Statewide Parent Involvement Conference is to provide a forum to enhance, support, and encourage parent involvement by creating opportunities for parents, educators, community leaders, and other friends of education to share interests, experiences, and information in an environment of mutual respect and cooperation," notes the conference's web site, located at http://www.tea.state.tx.us/parent_inv/init.html.

Gosh, that sounds really neat. But shouldn't that phrase read: "...other friends of (the) education (establishment) ...?"

It's very evident this conference is not about how to "empower" parents — that's something which is mandated (quite vaguely, unfortunately) in both state and federal law. This conference is about how to empower the education establishment to regulate, restrict and channel parental involvement into activities which give the education establishment even more power.

To borrow a phrase from Fort Worth parental activist Jean Donovan, when Texas took federal money, it had to alter the education code to comply with a federal regulation requiring parent inclusion.

This was done via Bill Ratliff's Senate Bill 1 in 1995. However, the bureaucracy's definition of this objective significantly differs from the definition dreamed up in Congress. It is, in fact, an attempt to increase the reach and power of the education establishment.

So what are the objectives of this meeting of bureaucratic minds? Again, quoting from the TEA's web site for the conference, with translations in plain English:

• Parent Education and Enrichment: To support parents as they cope with the daily challenges and growth opportunities that are part of their commitment to nurture their children's social and academic development. (Translation: parents will be taught the "correct" way to perform their parental duties.)

• Parent Rights and Responsibilities: To expand awareness of the rights and opportunities which are provided to parents by state and federal laws. (Translation: to make administrators aware of the legal hurdles they have to watch out for when challenged.)

• Reading and Literacy: To highlight the connection between reading skills and academic success and to promote reading as a life long, enjoyable leisure activity for both children and adults. (Translation: to make lack of home guidance a prime cause for the failure of "look-say" reading methods and reading failure.)

• Creating Successful Programs: To provide inspiration and guidance by sharing stories of successful programs, strategies, and practices which foster parent involvement and student achievement. (Translation: how to use your school's PTA/PTO to raise money for all kinds of things the school board won't buy for you.)

• Sharing Successes in Site-Based Decision Making. To encourage persons to become involved in SBDM by explaining the process and illustrating its successes both at the level of the school district and at the level of the local school. (Translation: how to use decentralization to shift the blame for failures from upper-level administrators to lower-level, on-site administrators and classroom teachers).

• Networking and Collaboration: To create opportunities for parents, educators, and other friends of education to exchange ideas, build relationships, and open lines of communication. (Translation: information on how to publicly respond to critics of the public educational bureaucracy by portraying them as "social conservatives," influenced by the "religious right," or simply "wackos" who seek to impede progress.)

Now, let's not forget the primary purpose of the conference: to get parents "involved" in ways which don't annoy the bureaucracy. As such, the TEA is promoting its "Parental Involvement Pledge" during the conference — a benignly-worded document which pretty much qualifies as a one-way contract, making parents accountable for children's failure but neglecting to "share" that responsibility with educators.

"Don't you just wonder what might happen if dissatisfied parents across America found a clever lawyer and filed a class action suit for educational malpractice?" Donovan asked members of her education loop on the Web.